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British Doctor Is Convicted in Failed Car Bombings

LONDON — A terrorism trial centering on the use of a bomb-laden Jeep to crash into the main doors of Glasgow’s airport terminal on a Saturday afternoon in June 2007 ended on Tuesday with the conviction of a 29-year-old British doctor with family roots in Iraq who was one of the two men who mounted the attack.

A jury found the doctor, Bilal Abdulla, a passenger in the Jeep Cherokee, guilty of two charges of conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to cause explosions in three bungled car bombing attempts in Glasgow and London over 24 hours. The judge, Sir Colin Crichton Mackay, will sentence Dr. Abdulla on Wednesday. Both charges carry potential life sentences.

The Jeep driver, Khafeel Ahmed, a 28-year-old Indian-born doctoral candidate in engineering who assembled the bombs, died a month later of severe burns received in the airport attack, which failed when gasoline canisters did not ignite propane gas cylinders in the Jeep’s trunk.

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Glasgow Airport on July 1, 2007, after a Jeep with Dr. Abdulla inside rammed the terminal doors.Credit
Pool photo by Mark Runnacles

The day before that attack, Dr. Abdulla and Mr. Ahmed drove to London’s West End theater district in two Mercedes-Benz sedans, primed with bombs similarly constructed from gasoline canisters and propane cylinders, along with 2,000 nails for shrapnel. The cars were parked outside a nightclub and beside a busy bus stop. The two attackers waited nearby with mobile phones linked to other phones wired to the bombs used as triggers.

But evidence at the trial showed that the two vehicles had failed to explode despite repeated signals from the mobile phones because of faulty assembly of the so-called fuel air bombs involved. Prosecutors said that a laptop owned by Dr. Abdulla — found in the Jeep that crashed into the air terminal — showed that the two men had studied blueprints for the bombs that they had found on Islamic extremists’ Web sites.

In lengthy testimony, Dr. Abdulla said he had intended only to give people in Britain “a taste of fear” and a “scare” with the bombings, not to kill people. But the chief prosecutor, Jonathan Laidlaw, said the timing of the attacks, at the height of Friday night crowds in central London, and on Glasgow airport’s busiest day of the year, showed that the attackers had aimed at “committing murder on an indiscriminate and wholesale scale.”

A third man, Dr. Mohammed Asha, 28, a Jordanian-born trainee neurosurgeon who, like Dr. Abdulla, was employed in Britain’s National Health Service, was acquitted of all charges. Dr. Asha had been accused of providing cash and advice to Dr. Abdulla, but his defense counsel said that he was a “pacifist” who had been duped into cooperating with the two bombers and that Dr. Abdulla had loaded documents suggesting terrorist sympathies into Dr. Asha’s laptop.

Dr. Abdulla, who left Britain with his parents at the age of 5 and earned his medical degree at a university in Baghdad, is likely to receive at least a 30-year prison sentence, according to legal experts. As the guilty verdicts were read, he shook Dr. Asha’s hand in the dock. Dr. Asha now faces a battle to avoid deportation, though the judge told him he hoped he would be able to remain in Britain to continue his training.

The trial, at Woolwich Crown Court, was one of a series of terrorism trials in the past two years that have fostered public anxiety in Britain about the risk of a major terrorist attack succeeding. Only one such attack, the suicide bombings of London’s transit system in 2005, succeeded, killing 56 people, including the four bombers. But Britain’s intelligence agencies have repeatedly warned that the country remains at high risk of attack.

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An undated photograph released by the London Metropolitan Police showing Bilal Abdulla with a gas canister in B&Q, a British home improvement store.Credit
Metropolitan Police, via European Pressphoto Agency

A notable feature of the trial was that it did not directly involve Islamic militants with a history of family ties to Pakistan or training there, in the pattern of many recent terrorist trials in Britain. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said during a weekend visit to Pakistan that three-quarters of all terrorist plots investigated by Britain’s intelligence and security agencies involved links to Pakistan, the ancestral homeland of about two-thirds of Britain’s Muslim population.

In the case of the Glasgow and London attacks, the plot had its origins in Iraq. Dr. Abdulla, identified by prosecutors as the plot’s mastermind, said he had deep affection for Britain, where his father, also a doctor, was working when he was born. But he said he became angry when, as a medical student, he experienced the sharp deterioration in hospital conditions in Baghdad under Western-supported economic sanctions in the 1990s, and later when he saw the suffering that allied bombing and occupying troops imposed on Iraqi civilians in the war that began in 2003.

The prosecution said Dr. Abdulla had contacts with the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that began shortly after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and introduced as evidence entries in a diary he kept while he was planning the bombings. “The soldiers killed the young and the old,” he wrote, speaking of allied troops. “They do not discriminate between men and women, so why should we?”

The court saw a message that prosecutors said he had written praising Al Qaeda. “I’ve learned from you to long for death,” he wrote.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: British Doctor Is Convicted In Failed Bomb Attempts. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe